Honoring Robert Gordon
On Friday, April 25 and Saturday, April 26, 2025, friends, colleagues, and former students gathered in the Kellogg Global Hub to celebrate the storied career of Department of Economics Professor Robert Gordon who retired from the Department of Economics at the end of the 2024-25 academic year after over fifty-one years of service at Northwestern.
Professor Gordon is now the Stanley G. Harris Professor Emeritus and will still be seen around campus in the upcoming academic year when he teaches a much sought-after first year writing seminar for Weinberg College freshmen. 
At the conference on April 25-26, Professor Gordon's colleagues presented lectures that emphasized Gordon's contributions to macroeconomics and economic history. The conference was organized by Department of Economics Professors Martin Eichenbaum and Joel Mokyr and was enthusiastically attended by local colleagues as well as collaborators and former students of Professor Gordon's who traveled from across the country. The Department of Economics is endlessly grateful to Professor Gordon for the contributions he's made to both the department and the university over the past fifty-one years.
About Robert Gordon
Robert Gordon is a macroeconomist with a particular interest in unemployment, inflation, and both the long-run and cyclical aspects of labor productivity. He is the author of a textbook in intermediate macroeconomics, now in its 12th edition, and has completed a new book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, published by the Princeton University Press in January, 2016. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2014 he was elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. In 2016 he was named by Bloomberg as one of the 50 most influential people in the world. For more than three decades, he has been a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee, which determines the start and end dates for recessions in the United States.
